As I mentioned in the last post, Karina and I headed off to an engagement encounter weekend in Constantia. The weekend is aimed to get you ready or for you to find out if you are ready to get married. There were 24 other couples just like us on this weekend – and as we found out, there were over 700 other engagement encounters exactly the same as our one happening all over the world!

These engagement encounters are run by the Catholic church, but you don’t have to be a Catholic to attend – as a few of the couples were. It’s also not a weekend about teaching you or getting you to join the Catholic faith, its a weekend aimed at finding out if you are ready for marriage, with a biblical angle thrown in for very good measure.

The weekend was jammed packed with talks and small activities. Every session is taught by one of the married couples or the Priest – and after the session, you are given a set of questions and asked to write love letters to each other in an A5 booklet. After you’ve written your love letter, you get together with your partner and read their love letter and then discuss them. It really is the most amazing way to learn about each other. Karina and I both almost finished the A5 booklet! I called these booklet the blueprint to my heart, because literally all your emotions about each other are written in them.

After the weekend, you feel emotionally drained. I literally poured my heart out to Karina for 2 and a half days straight! Its also very rewarding to spend such quality time with your partner learning, discussing and loving one another.

I’ll post the details here in this post of who to contact if you know of anyone that would like to attend an engagement encounter. They are held all over South Africa every few months, and I highly recommend every engaged couple to attend one. I think it should be compulsory for couples to attend – the divorce rate in South Africa would be far less than what it currently is!

One thing is for sure, after a weekend like this, you will know 100% if you are going to be marrying the right person or not!

Another checkbox off the list – The Wedding Cake.

I can’t stand those boring old stuck in the corner only for decoration white cakes that you see at weddings. Although times are changing, and the chocolate cakes are starting to come out, people don’t really get to eat your cake… until my wedding!

We have ordered a custom designed wedding cake from Charly’s Bakery in Cape Town. They are the Willy Wonka from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory of cupcakes, wedding cakes and all things baked. We tasted a piece of their chocolate brownies that makes up a wedding cake and it is by far one of the best pieces of any type of cake I have ever eaten! Jacqui – who runs Charly’s Bakery is amazing! She really has a passion for weddings and baking. She must do 100′s of cakes and she treated us as if we were one of her close friends that were getting married – which really makes choosing her and her bakery to make our cake so much easier.

So, remember to save some space in your tummy for our wedding cake, its going to be awesome!

Looking for a person to do our invitations and all the other stationery has been a really interesting experience! We initially found 3 people we wanted to see for quotes, but after seeing just 2 of them, we knew exacty who we are going with.

1 person came with a decent recommendation – the other, a reputation…

Paper Garden

Funny enough the lady that runs Paper Garden in the “Cape Town” area runs it from her home right opposite our church in Strand! This at first we thought wasn’t really such a good thing, since how good could a person be in creating wedding invitations if they came from the Strand?

Well we were mightily impressed. We sat at her table that was covered in left-over invitations that we got to play around with to see exactly how our invitations would look like. Chop this, change that, use that colour, or maybe this insert… it really was a lot of fun. She went through the entire process with us from the invitations, to the ceremony list, to the seating arrangements and confetti ideas. We came away from her really having a sense that we knew exactly how our entire wedding would be branded – which is something I am big into. Verdict: Very chuffed, but we hadn’t seen anyone else yet – but the standard had been set.

Elsje Designs

We went to see Elsje after work one evening. This was an experience to behold. The following is my account of events.

Arrive at Elsje Designs. We are greeted at the door by one of her 3 assistants. She comes out of her studio to greet us and I am given a 3 page document regarding our wedding to fill in. We are told to choose a few – “Not more than 4” invitations up on the walls to start with. Elsje leaves us alone and I fill in the paper work and Karina start to look around. Eventually I am looking all of these other peoples wedding invitations and getting very confused. I don’t want someone else’s wedding invitation? She comes out and I explain to her that she is making us choose another weddings invitation and that we are slightly confused on how this works. She sits us down and goes through our documentation. One thing I made a grave mistake of doing was ticking box 2 out of 4 when it came to price we are willing to pay. Elsje then takes us as a cheap couple wanting a lot, but not paying much for it.

I eventually just take a boring invitation off the wall and say “well this is ok-ish, but its not the right colour”. After spending roughly 20 minutes with us going over the invitation – we have gone with this exact invitation in a white envelope and white invite. Everything we try and suggest gets the disapproval of Elsje so eventually I am sarcastically agreeing to EVERYTHING she says so we can get out of there!

So once we finished, she wants us to pay a R200 consulting fee, which I decline since no one even told us about it!

Anyway, the experience was extremely strange and off putting. Elsje comes across very cold and methodical about the entire process. Not once is she even trying to sell her self or a design. She also kept on bringing up words like “cheap” and “too expensive” which really puts Karina and I off even more.

All I can say is that after telling this story to a few people, Elsje designs seems to have quite a reputation for late delivery as well as some of her staff leaving because they cannot put up with her.

I am not knocking Elsje, all I am telling is our experience with her and that I cannot recommend her services. With regards to the R200 fee, I have a feeling that for her to charge a fee for a consultation means she probably has a high rate of people declining her services, thus the reason for the charge. If you were doing 10 quotes a day, and 8 of them were buying your services, you would never even consider charging a consulting fee, not so?

So, Paper Garden are now officially one of our recommended service providers. And expect something small from us very soon.